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I'm a well-known mainframe performance guy, with almost 30 years of experience helping customers manage systems. I also dabble in lots of other technology. I've sought to widen the Performance role, incorporating aspects of infrastructural architecture.

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JVM-based languages have an interesting property for z/OS programmers: They are zAAP-eligible. As we all know zAAP Eligibility brings a number of benefits - including the licence charge benefits and the ability to run on a full-speed processor even when your general-purpose processors are subcapacity ones. (I'll briefly mention zAAP-on-zIIP here for completeness, and then move on.) You... [More]

Here's another "For Beginners" post to encourage people to just leap in and try it... Javascript is a language popularly used for such things as web pages with some programming in them (and that includes frameworks like dojo), building Firefox extensions, and the Adobe AIR (desktop) runtime. As it happens I'm pretty familiar with Javascript anyway - having done all 3 of the above. This post shows... [More]

First of all, a happy and prosperous 2010 to one and all. As with most vacations it's been a time partially filled with playing with technology and learning stuff there isn't (legitimate) time to learn about during the rest of the year. So, lest the rest of this post make you think I ONLY play with web stuff :-) I present to you a short list of REALLY good other things from the past few weeks:... [More]

The very first computer game I ever played was called Rhino and it ran on a Commodore PET. The school had been lent one for a fortnight. (I don't know why as we didn't go on to buy any, instead getting a single RML 380Z.) Imagine a character-grid screen where the rhino's are represented by pi symbols that chase you as you try to move from A to B. It was written in BASIC and allowed from 1 to 10... [More]

In Workload Manager Policy in XML Format - Part I I showed you how you can use PHP to extract Classification Rules information from the WLM Service Definition (once converted to XML format). This post gives an example of extracting a different set of information from the XML Service Definition, using javascript and, in particular, XMLHttpRequest (sometimes known as XHR). There is a slightly... [More]

Well, how many do you have? I'll admit to 4 on my Windows XP Laptop (and 2 versions of 1 on my ASUS EEE PC, running Linux)... I firmly believe in having an "emergency browser". At 0ne time that would have been Internet Explorer - for two reasons: To recover a broken browser. As I mainly use Firefox Nightly builds I sometimes get cases where I need a fresh install of a prior nightly to get me out... [More]

With apologies to cat keepers everywhere (of whom I'm one). Most of my reporting - when not graphical using GDDM - is created using Bookmaster. This looks in many ways like HTML and is another declarative markup language for text. It used to be what most IBM publications (including Redbooks) are written in. And customers bought Bookmaster (and DCF / Script/VS), embedding it into the... [More]

Nowadays - actually thenadays :-) but more so nowadays - the value of a web page is related to how well structured it is. Well structured from a mashup programmer's point of view... As I often say you have to assume that people will want to take your web pages and mash them up in ways you never thought likely. If your web page is hard to navigate, extract material from, etc then people will use... [More]